


meet me in the woods

by PurpleLex



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: David "Micro" Lieberman (mentioned), F/M, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Foggy Nelson (mentioned) - Freeform, Implied Sexual Content, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2017-11-16
Packaged: 2019-02-03 07:46:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12744066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PurpleLex/pseuds/PurpleLex
Summary: [ tumblr prompt: "I would DIE if you wrote a couple of scenes where Karen army trains with Frank. I could TOTALLY see Frank being like, "You can't get involved in the extra dangerous stuff unless you at least let me train you." Imagine them running in the mornings??? Karen getting into crazy shape and the tension between them intensifying???" ]





	meet me in the woods

 

 

The leaves crunch loudly underneath her boots, but Karen’s just fine with that. It’s better if he knows she’s coming. Might give him enough time to come up with a decent excuse for the disappearing act of the past two weeks, even.

It’d been a fluke of a mistake, bullet not even meant for her as the antsy criminals fired openly into the crowd at the edge of the police barricades. One second, she was charming one of her anonymous police contacts for a more honest update on the stand-off, and in the next she’d stumbled in her heels, barely managing to lock her knees before losing balance.

The pain hadn’t even been much. A piercing heat, uncomfortable wetness, and then panicking shock consumed every nerve.

Three distinctly more precise shots rang out as her palms scraped on asphalt and the mayhem stopped almost as soon as it’d started. But it wasn’t the police.

The Punisher.

She’s just at the bottom of the cabin’s steps when the door swings open. Frank steps out to the railing, eyeing her warily from the corner of his eye with a steaming cup in hand. The instant whiff of coffee makes her bite back a fond smile.

“What’re you doing here, ma'am?”

“Looking for you.”

“…Micro?”

Karen shrugs. “He was worried about you too.”

A snort, and he takes a gulp with a wince. She wonders how fresh it is and what the chances are that he just burned his tongue for the sake of prolonging their conversation’s ultimate destination. “He ain’t got any reason to be; he knows what I’m doin’.”

“So? What are you doing?”

She tilts her head. Frank’s eyes land on her shoulder. “…How’s the therapy?”

“Expensive,” she retorts.

“Ma'am–”

“If you even try to do the thing where you or Micro offer to help me out with your insanely illegal funds, I’ll kick you in your shins. My legs still work just fine.”

Climbing the steps, she slides her hands out of her jacket’s pockets slowly, carefully keeping her right arm close to her side. There’s a twinkle of a sort in his gaze at her words but a frown tugs from watching her.

“I got lost for an hour trying to find this place, the least you can do is invite me in.”

Looking back to the sad and overgrown excuse of a driveway for a minute, Frank sighs and lets some of the tension loose from his spine. He holds the screen door open for her. “You want a cup?”

She smiles this time. “Always.”

 

* * *

 

Karen brings a bag with her, but she doesn’t mean to stay. Not really.

“You can’t take care of that yourself,” he insists later when they’re on their second pot and dusk starts to settle early over the tree-tops.

He still hasn’t given her much of an answer about dropping of the radar since gunning down her reckless attackers, hasn’t given her much of an opening to ask about it actually, but she has the time so she lets him dance around it. Lets the conversation flow in every direction except the very reason she was here.

She scoffs then, tracing the mug’s rim absently with the index finger of her good hand. Frank’s gaze tracks the movement after checking the view out the windows again. “It ain’t about your capability, ma'am. You won’t heal well if you don’t know how to treat it right.”

“I’m treating it just fine. I’m being careful.”

“Then where’s the sling?”

“Didn’t need it.”

Frank flicks his eyes up to catch hers and his brows lift in suspicion. She almost holds the stare, almost tries to wait him out, but the stubborn white lie isn’t worth that. And admitting the truth isn’t exactly problem enough to warrant that.

She sighs. “It got in the way. But I don’t need it, I’ve been–”

“Fine?” He guesses, leaning back when she stops moving her hand and presses her lips together. “Yeah. I’m sure.”

The tone ticks her off. Karen turns her head.

A moment passes, and the stuffy air suffocating the room makes him stand, taking her cup in hand with his to the kitchen sink. She opens her mouth to protest before she thinks better of it. It was getting late and she’d come here to pester him, to prod and poke and make him look her in the eye, but suddenly something uncomfortable knots around her stomach, warns her against lingering. She had work to resume, a life to get back to.

They were passing ships that always had each other’s backs and showed up in the dead of night. She’d only thought to push because maybe, at some level, she’d hoped…for something more. But that was stupid. Pointless.

Karen stands.

“Stay here for a couple days,” he says, back to her as the faucet runs down the drain.

“…What?”

“You gonna get rehab for that shoulder when you drive back?”

“No,” she says honestly. Simply.

“And you’re gonna go back to investigating another exposé, huh?”

“Probably. Yes.”

“Then stay.” Shutting off the tap, Frank turns around, wiping the water off his hands with a towel. “At least let me train you. If you’re gonna keep running around, jumping head-first into dangerous shit whether I’m there or not, you need more than that sharp tongue and a gun.”

There’s some sort of compliment there, but Karen moves to fold her arms without thinking, wincing when she twists the damaged one. “I can take care of myself without a gun, too.”

He tilts his head. “Not anymore. Not with that shoulder the way it is.”

 

* * *

 

“You’re really lucky, Karen,” Foggy had said after going through the run-down the doctor had given him. Benefits of being the emergency contact with no family listed, he’d mentioned as well, and if he knew from her slip-ups with Matt that she was supposed to have a brother, he didn’t give any indication.

She doesn’t feel lucky now as she struggles to keep pace with Frank, jogging up and down the winding gravel drive for the fourth day straight. Her thighs burn, lungs aching, shoulder joint jostling painfully with every bounce, but she struggles around deep breaths and doesn’t dare complain.

Ellison had been all too happy to grant her the sick leave she’d initially declined full usage of as soon as the hospital discharged her. It struck a chord of guilt within her, realizing how much she had worried him, Foggy, everyone in the tight circle she had left to call friends and family. It wasn’t her burden to bear, wasn’t her choice, but her heart had never been one to listen to logic very well.

“You come out here for this?” She manages to ask after they pass the tree to the left carved with a thin vertical line. When he’d pointed it out the first time they started this, she’d missed it for a couple seconds, so faint it blended right in with the bark’s pattern. It was a marker.

The half-way point.

Karen had been tempted to strangle him at the end of that day before she’d collapsed on the couch.

He shakes his head at her question. “Don’t get soft just from being in the city.”

Yeah, she knew that all too well. As soon as her eyes drift down to his muscled arms, his chest, she jerks her head back towards the dense forest stretching out in front of them. Halfway, which meant another mile, which meant she had three before the cabin came blissfully into view again. Three more miles until she could sink to the floor of the tiny bathtub and let cold water cleanse away her pains.

“How’re you feelin’?”

“Fine,” she grits.

Frank has the audacity to smirk.

 

* * *

 

There’s only the cot and the couch. Both are terrible, but she insists on the couch despite his continued offering with an easy excuse of its hardness hurting her back. Partially true, but mostly false.

She just didn’t want to smell him all night long.

As it is, she’s hyper aware of the small confines of the cabin, how often and how long he massages and maneuvers her shoulder every day with a completely clinical gaze that nonetheless pools an uncomfortable heat below her stomach every time, and even finds herself self-conscious of the more than modest length of her sleep-shirt and shorts. Can’t stop being aware of it all despite how casually Frank behaves.

There’s moments, sometimes, where she thinks that he might be putting on an act, too.

When his hand lingers too long against her waist after helping her up the stairs when she gets light-headed once. When he holds her smile with an intense one of his own after a laugh over a stupid story at dinner. When he gets up to shrug a shirt on faster and more fluidly than she would’ve thought possible after she steps out of the bathroom early and finds him distractedly sorting through his arsenal bare-chested, forgetting her presence for a minute.

Not that she would’ve minded if he’d left if off. But Karen finds herself more relieved than disappointed afterward, anyway.

Boundaries – that’s what the cabin blurred between them.

It was easy to maintain them when it was him visiting her apartment or her stopping by their main hideout for a few hours. They’d only slipped a couple times after long stake-outs and life-threatening situations, the yearning to hold tight a by-product of sleepy loneliness and panicked adrenaline. They knew it, they’d talked about it, and they’d dismissed it.

She’d been able to lie so easily in those situations about feeling anything else.

When a week passes, a nearly full moon illuminates the sky after darkness descends, and Frank joins her on the steps. “Happy about somethin’?”

She isn’t aware she’s got half a smile curving her lips until she looks over at the unabashed curiosity in his eyes.

It’d never bothered her to talk about Kevin with him and it flows easily from her now as she rambles out the memories stuck vividly just behind her eyelids. She shares all the times she’d grouped up with her brother and their rowdy friends, traipsing through the forest that stretched for what seemed like forever between their house and an apple orchard. How they’d flit between playing Robinson Crusoe or New World Explorers or G.I. Joe in the stupid adventure of the week.

“I ruined so many pants doing that, oh my God.” She shakes her head. “Always got the bottoms matted in those prickly burrs by the end of the day. That pissed my parents off so much; they blamed me every time.”

Frank chuckles. “So that’s what Karen Page looked like at ten, hm? Rebel child turned ace reporter.”

“No, that was eight year old me,” she corrects wryly. “At about ten, I got a crazy idea in my head to lop off all my hair to about here,” she says with a hand gesturing just below her ears.

She doesn’t expect when he reaches out, scooping her hair up and folding it back until he’s imitating her directions. “I can see it,” he says, words pitched a touch softer than the conversation warrants.

He must notice, or maybe he sees it in her affected gaze and the flush rising to her cheeks, because he lets go only a second later. Karen clears her throat. “And you? Come on, if you have any embarrassing hair stories, you have to share. Don’t leave me hanging.”

Chuckling again, he rubs a hand over his chin. “There might’ve been a bad middle school trend.”

 

* * *

 

“Hey, you okay?” He asks, coming to her side in a second.

Karen swipes at a smudge of wet dirt she can feel on her cheek while Frank takes hold of her arm, helping her up off her stomach and back onto her feet. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

Tripping over a tree’s root, she’d gone sprawling, and the humiliation wouldn’t be all that bad if she hadn’t knocked the breath out of her lungs from her inability to fully catch herself thanks to the still-tender shoulder. His hand slides up to it now, squeezes gently. He watches her wince. “How bad?”

“It’s okay,” she insists.

“Okay, or ‘fine’?”

“I can’t get over it if I keep babying it, right?”

She doesn’t waver as he holds her stare. An unhappy nod, and his hand slides down to her elbow. Karen relaxes her joint and lets him move her arm forward, backwards, up and down. Testing it. A twinge shoots down to her hand once, but it’s familiar, so she’s able to ignore it and keep the reaction at bay.

His thumb rubs a gentle circle against her skin, a soothing gesture, and then he pulls away. She tells herself she doesn’t miss it.

Frank steps back and raises his arms up in a defensive pose relaxed enough to annoy her, waiting for her signal. Inhaling deeply, she bounces on the balls of her feet, focusing once more on practicing her reflexes. “Okay,” she says. A pause. And then he strikes from the right, too fast for her to register it fully within her periphery.

In the beginning, she hadn’t thought this exercise would work well. They both knew he wouldn’t hit her – that he’d be able to stop just short, as confirmed in their first session right away – but, somehow, it’s challenging anyway. Stretches out her senses, makes her more aware of her surroundings, keeps her light on her feet. Gives them both a little hope that next time a bullet comes whizzing her way, she might be able to miss it.

She dodges instinctively with a duck, his arm swinging high over her head.

He gives her barely a moment to breathe before he’s lunging again. She grins.

 

* * *

 

Micro calls. Says something about a limited window of opportunity to corner and question an asset they’ve been keeping tabs on in Brooklyn, and Frank has it on speaker while he fixes a pot of coffee, letting her hear enough of it after she steps out of the bathroom to know that he has to go. She has to go.

Packing up her things and slipping on her shoes without a word, she fetches the few things left lying around away from her bag. Frank goes through a similar ritual of his own as she sips a quick dose of caffeine.

Something uneasy tugs at the back of her mind, as if she’s being forced out of a dreamy haze and back into reality. For a scant second, she pinches herself, expecting to blink and wake back up in the hospital with Foggy at her side and the narcotics in her system subsiding enough to let her think again. Her skin only stings in response.

She rinses out the cup and sets it in the dish rack.

One of them should say something. She should say something.

But he’s focused on making sure nothing’s left behind that shouldn’t be, ticking off boxes in that head of his and completely oblivious to anything else, so when he pushes out the back door to grab the two shirts he has up on the line, she steps out the front. Karen folds herself quietly into her car for the first time in ten days and pulls away.

 

* * *

 

Frank knocks on her door the next day.

Same jacket and hoodie, same jeans, same boots. It’s barely dawn, but he looks at her as if she’s the more confusing one. “Are you plannin’ on running in those pajamas, ma'am? They look…light.”

She presses her hip against the edge of the door and tucks her hair more firmly behind her ears. “You’re joking.”

A single shake of his head, and he’s got that same light in his eyes again. Amusement. “You said you’d let me train you, and that doesn’t stop just ‘cause we’re back in the city. I thought we went over this.”

Karen vaguely recalls a comment about going soft and it drags a smile to her lips before she can help it. If there’s some relief at him not resuming his disconnect of before, too, then it’s responsible for the way she opens her door wider and pads back to her bedroom while he steps inside. “I need a minute.”

“I’ll give you five.”

“Wow, so generous.”

He snorts.

 

* * *

 

“You never told me why,” she finally says when they stop in a diner one night.

She’d dropped off a file for Micro, an accidental potential find that reminded her of something he’d been looking into, and when Frank followed her out, she’d expected him to ask about the rest of her work, maybe the cartel they’d crossed paths on recently as they were digging into it together, or even the training sessions. He simply said he’d walk her home.

“Why what?”

“Why you disappeared after I got shot.”

His head snaps to the side and she can see how his gaze is cast downward from the flutter of lashes on cheekbone despite his attempts at only appearing vigilant. The waiter brings their burgers a minute later, but neither touch the food as she stares across the table and waits, sipping her coffee. The bell over the door jingles from a group of teenagers filing in.

“I know it was because of me, Frank, you can admit it.”

“It wasn’t you,” he denies immediately. Turning his head, he watches her trace the rim of her cup with her bad hand this time. The difference was hardly noticeable anymore – only she was the one to still feel the lingering pains. “It was, but it wasn’t.”

“…I don’t know what that means.”

“You were doin’ the right thing, that day, and you still got hurt.”

“I’m always doing the right thing, hunting the truth–”

“You were on the sidelines,” he stresses harshly, lifting his eyes to hers. “You were doin’ the right thing, you were in the right place, and you got shot….And there’s nothin’ I can do to keep shit like that from happening again. I can’t.”

There’s something rough in the way he grounds out the words with half a scowl, but she reaches a hand across the table because of the vulnerability in his wide eyes, the panic she can so easily identify in his tone. As soon as her fingers wrap around his, she stills. Karen hadn’t even noticed how much he’d been twitching.

She leans into his intensity now.

“No one can stop everything. But I’m okay, Frank.”

Wary disbelief sits heavy behind his stare.

“I’m okay.”

The diner bustles around them. Though he doesn’t say anything, eyes falling back to the tabletop, he twists his wrist slowly, fingers falling back. She takes a chance on her gut and slides her palm against his, squeezing once. A promise. Frank clasps his hand around hers hard enough to bruise, but she doesn’t mind.

 

* * *

 

There’s a hallway in their hide-out that Karen hadn’t ever been past until she’d shown up for their training session and Micro gestured back. It’s a giant and very dilapidated room of the warehouse storing part of an arsenal at one end and an array of makeshift workout equipment at the other. Hanging bar, weights, boxing bag, and more she doesn’t recognize.

When she spies the section of countertop left along a wall with a stand-alone sink next to it seemingly serving as a wound clean-up spot, she doesn’t pause to dwell. She’s more than well aware of the consequences of his work. At least now she knows what he does and where he goes when it’s not convenient for him to knock on her door.

Rain pounds against the windows from a particularly long storm as she dodges another hit. “Hold on,” she pants after, propping her hands on her knees and sucking in a deep breath.

Frank fetches her water bottle for her and brings it over. Accepting it gratefully, she takes a gulp before he’s stepping well into her space, hands on her right shoulder. “Same spot?”

She nods.

His fingers knead behind her rotator cuff, prompting a startled wince from her that she can’t control before a tingle rushes through her tendons. In a short minute, the knot of muscle loosens and the pain dissipates. She sighs. He tests her range of motion. “You’re a fast healer.”

“Really?” Karen huffs and sags against him slightly when he starts massaging her shoulder again. “Thought that was just something they tell you after traumatic accidents to make you feel better about something.”

“…How’d you end up?” He asks quietly for the first time.

Pausing, she licks her lips and fixes her gaze on the droplets dribbling down the other side of the colored glass panes. “Bruises everywhere. Concussion. Internal bleeding in my abdomen that put me back in surgery for a second time and a couple cracked ribs, I think. My arms were so scraped up from crawling over the glass, I remember someone giving me a talk about treatments for scars in case I wanted it, or needed it, or whatever.”

One of his hands ghosts over her wrist. “You wouldn’t know it, lookin’ at you.”

“I don’t get many scars skin-deep,” she jokes, recognizing that it’s a bit morbid without following the habitual urge of covering that up with false excuses.

When she looks at Frank, she sinks into the fondness she finds there. “Like I said, ma'am. You’re not one to show them.”

Slowly, she smiles from the dual meaning, and he steps away. She sets her bottle off to the side but doesn’t move into any position. “Why don’t we ever spar for real?”

“…You serious?”

“Yes.”

He licks his lips, glancing away for a moment before tilting his head at her. “You lookin’ to get into a street brawl with anyone in particular?”

“No,” she laughs. “But I want to know how to hold my own. I can dodge, run, kick them in the balls, and gouge eyes out. If I don’t grab a gun or pepper spray. But that’s all…reactive. I don’t even know how to punch properly. So train me.”

Something warm and terribly attractive threatens to tug Frank’s lips into a smirk. “Hold out your hand.”

When she does, he takes her palm in his own, showing her every right and wrong way to curl her fingers into a fist. The ways to strike the most force, to lessen the impact on her knuckles, the twists for the best sucker-punches and upper-cuts. She grins at the knowledge.

It makes her feel powerful.

He gestures. “Try it.”

Karen strikes out.

An easy side-step, and she misses.

“How am I going to practice if I can’t hit you?”

“Then hit me,” he dares.

She takes him up on the challenge.

After a minute, she manages to land one, and then another, and she holds back at first, same as how he’d always kept from really hitting her before and how he keeps it to defensive blocks now, but at some point the adrenaline kicks in again. When it’s clear that she’s not going to bowl him over after an accidentally hard knock to his cheek, she stops controlling herself. Gives in to trying her best.

The rain beats louder against the window when she’s gasping, over-stepping too much, and then Frank surprises her by wrapping an arm around her from behind. She strikes at his stomach and face out of instinct, but he doesn’t falter. His grin presses against the back of her neck. “Calm down. They grab you – what d'you do?”

Karen sucks in a breath, recalls the last time they’d practiced this. But he knew exactly what to expect.

She sags, feigns leaning to the left, and she’s got him shifting the wrong foot back when she psyches him out by wrapping her right heel around his other knee. Momentum crashes him to the floor despite his best attempts otherwise and she spins, straddling his chest with a raised fist. They freeze, eyes locking.

His expression matches the heat that pools low in her belly from the suddenly intimate position. She inhales raggedly.

Thunder follows a lightning strike with a crackling boom.

At her momentary relaxation from the distraction, Frank flips them, pinning her with a hand half around her neck and another on her good arm’s wrist. Her lungs seize again as their breaths mingle in the short distance but she’d give anything for him not to move. She licks her dry lips, staring at his own as her free hand grips his bicep. His thumb swipes over her pulse-point.

Karen arches to meet him.

As soon as their lips brush, the kiss deepens desperately. He lets go of her wrist and grabs hold of her waist, grinding their hips together when he settles between her opening legs, fingers at her neck a gentle pressure to tilt her jaw up further. She claws at his shirt, his shoulders, before finding the hem. He drags it over his head and tosses it in the corner.

She almost laughs but he pulls lightly at her hair and she throws her head back as he licks down the column of her neck, hand on her waist rising to palm her breast through her shirt. A wanton moan escapes her. So often, with everyone of her past and everyone around her, she’s tried to keep control, keep herself together. Karen couldn’t care less now as she lets go, finding purchase with hands threaded through his hair as she chases his dizzying passion with her own.

His mouth finds hers again, hot and demanding, as he unbuttons her pants. When his hand slips against her underwear and finds her already wet, he groans. “I should–” Frank starts, sucking in a harsh breath when she intentionally lifts her hips to press her heels against his lower back, feels his hardness grind against her thigh. “Fuck, we should move to the bed.”

“Don’t you dare stop,” she begs between kisses. “That mattress is shit anyway.”

A quick laugh that vibrates pleasantly against her skin, and then he jerks her pants down. She grins.


End file.
